2013/11/03

Obama, NSA Spying and the Dangers of Secretive, Authoritarian Government By John W. Whitehead

“The perception here is of a United States where security
has trumped liberty, intelligence agencies run amok (vacuuming up data
of friend and foe alike), and the once-admired “checks and balances”
built into American governance and studied by European schoolchildren
have become, at best, secret reviews of secret activities where opposing
arguments get no hearing.” – New York Times columnist Roger Cohen

Recent
reports indicating that President Obama was aware of and personally
approved an NSA program that involved spying on the personal
communications of various international leaders, including German
Chancellor Angela Merkel, have once again highlighted the deception and
intransigence of the Obama administration in dealing with the
revelations that the National Security Agency has been acting outside
the bounds of the law, sucking up electronic communications the world
over.

While this may come as a shock to most Americans, I’ve been writing
about the NSA’s illegal surveillance tactics since the 1980s, which
features prominently in my new book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State.
However, this latest development in the spying saga—that the NSA has
been aiming its surveillance activities at the citizens of allied
countries, including France and Germany—has thrown a kink into the Obama
administration’s attempts at maintaining a cozy relationship with its
foreign allies.

Specifically, according to comments by an anonymous “high-level” NSA
official to a German newspaper, President Barack Obama personally
approved spying on the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. These comments
come despite claims made by the White House last week that Obama had no
idea that the NSA had tapped her phone. The NSA has denied the reports
that Obama was personally briefed on the Merkel spying operation in
2010, but did not indicate whether he may have learned about it via
other means.

According to a report by German newspaper Der Spiegel, the NSA had been
spying on Merkel since 2002, before she was Chancellor and acting as an
opposition leader. The NSA had also allegedly been spying on French and
German citizens, an accusation which prompted both countries to demand
an explanation from the United States about the purpose and reasoning
behind the spying programs. The US spying on German communications was
apparently conducted from the American embassy in Berlin.

According to another anonymous US official, the United States was
engaged in espionage on 35 world leaders, but most of these programs
have been terminated or are set to be terminated. This official also
claims that Obama was unaware of the program, and that the NSA had
chosen not to brief him on all their various spying operations, saying,
“These decisions are made at the NSA. The president doesn’t sign off on
this stuff.”

Whatever the exact truth of the matter, there are two possible
scenarios. Either the President was fully aware of the extent of the
NSA’s criminal activities, which violate both domestic and international
law, and was willing to go along with them or the NSA has amassed so
much power in Washington that it literally operates outside the chain of
command and above the rule of law. In either case, we face a tyrannical
force the likes of which have never been seen in the United States
before.

In just one month (January 2013), the NSA spied on some 125 billion
phone calls worldwide, 3 billion of which originated in the United
States. In addition to German and French citizens, the NSA has targeted
Spain as well, sweeping up some 60 million communications in the span of
one month.

Of course, this global surveillance program should come as no surprise.
Since September 11, 2001, the United States has spent over $500 billion
on an intelligence community that, according to the Washington Post,
constitutes an “espionage empire with resources and a reach beyond those
of any adversary, sustained even now by spending that rivals or exceeds
the levels at the height of the Cold War.” The CIA and NSA have both
begun to engage in so-called “offensive cyber operations,” which
involves hacking into foreign computer networks in order to either steal
information or sabotage the network itself.

In fact, the NSA has been conducting worldwide surveillance for quite
some time. Echelon, a global electronic surveillance network that allows
security agencies of Great Britain and the United States, as well as
Canada, Australia and New Zealand, to collect and exploit intelligence
collected worldwide, was developed by the NSA. Created in the heat of
the Cold War, Echelon intercepts and analyzes virtually every phone
call, fax and email message sent anywhere in the world. It does so by
positioning “listening stations” (including land bases, satellites and
ships sailing the seven seas) all over the globe to capture data,
satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic communications traffic.

Although Echelon was originally established as an international spy
system, suspicions arose at the dawn of the new millennium that its
intelligence ambitions might have turned inward. A Congressional
investigation determined that Echelon had not only turned inward,
targeting such peaceful political groups as Amnesty International,
Greenpeace and several Christian groups, but had actually broadened the
scope of its mission to include political espionage. It also became a
means of benefiting big business and advancing personal political
agendas. For example, in March 2003, the British Observer asserted that
the Bush Administration had used its Echelon satellite station in New
Zealand to spy on council members from Angola, Bulgaria, Camaroon,
Chile, Guinea and Pakistan in its effort to garner support for the
impending war against Iraq.

The other main object of Echelon seems to be corporate espionage. In
1993, President Bill Clinton directed the NSA to use Echelon facilities
to spy on Japanese car manufacturers developing zero-emission cars and
to pass on critical information to the three largest American car
manufacturers, Ford, General Motors and Chrysler. In the 1990s, German
firm Enercon, a wind generator manufacturer, developed innovative wind
related technology. However, by the time it was ready to sell the
technology to the US, the US rival company had already patented a
similar project. Later, an NSA employee admitted to stealing the
technology through phone taps and computer link line spying.

Given the NSA’s history, there is nothing innocent about a worldwide
program of surveillance. Rather, this is the dawning of a new era, an
expansion of the Cold War mentality of tracking an unknown enemy which
only exists in the imagination of those who seek more power. Al-Qaeda’s
capability to penetrate the American homeland is nil. The chances of
dying in a terrorist attack are miniscule. There is no justification for
these programs, which is why they have been conducted and approved in
secret. Any public scrutiny would demonstrate their ineffectiveness and
uselessness.

Unfortunately, our so-called representatives in Congress are doing very
little to combat the menace of unlawful surveillance, going out of their
way to justify these programs and give them the trappings of
legitimacy. For example, Rep. Mike Rogers, head of the House
Intelligence Committee, made the bizarre claim that the rise of fascism
in Europe in the early 20th century could be attributed to the United
States failing to spy on its allies: “We said: ‘We’re not going to do
any kinds of those things, that would not be appropriate’ Look what
happened in the 30s: the rise of fascism, the rise of communism, the
rise of imperialism. We didn’t see any of it. And it resulted in the
deaths of tens of millions of people.”

Battles are being waged between civil liberties-minded representatives
and law-and-order types such as Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who is
drafting a bill that would codify the NSA’s program of collecting the
metadata of American communications. She supports her position by making
nonsensical statements such as, “People believe it’s surveillance, but
it’s not.”

Contrary to Feinstein’s claims, the NSA is collecting personal
information on every single person in the United States who uses a
computer or phone. The NSA is able to crack the security of all major
smartphones, including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry devices, which
gives agents access to information such as contacts, SMS messages, and
location data. The NSA is also suspected to be engaging in so-called
“man in the middle” attacks, which involve NSA agents pretending to be
legitimate web services (in this case search engine Google) in order to
obtain private information. These and other programs, such as PRISM and
XKEYSCORE, open our private lives to government agents who are only a
computer click away from knowing what we do on a daily basis.

Ultimately, it comes down to whether you want an open, transparent and
therefore free government or a closed, secretive, authoritarian regime.
For those who claim to want open and free government, it’s time to
restore the rightful balance in government and make it clear to our
leaders that these spying programs are unacceptable and will not be
tolerated. Remember, a true patriot is one who upholds the principles
upon which his country was founded, not the power of those who have
hijacked the nation.

John Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties and human rights organization.